The Ultimate Guide to Digital Photography in the Mountains

II. Carrying the gear

You might not believe me (at first), but this is by far the most important part of this guide. It is knowing how to have your gear accessible that will make the difference between getting back home with photos or not.

Having it with you

Try the following experiment: take a DSLR, put it in your backpack and go climb a mountain. I can pretty much guarantee that you will get pictures from exactly two locations: the camp, and the summit. The reason is that those places are the only ones where you are going to stop long enough for the hassle of getting your gear out to be worthwhile. If you think about it, you need to: unclip your pack straps and possibly parts of your harness (e.g. if you are wearing a chest one), take your pack down, open it, dig your camera bag out, open the camera bag, take the camera out, shoot, and reverse all of that. It's at least a couple of minutes before you can take the first picture, and no less than 10 minutes break for the whole party. And even if it taking that long that wasn't a big problem, the real reason that you won't stop is that climbing is an extremely involving task, both mentally and physically, and that you will be unwilling to break the "flow" by switching to an entirely different activity for that long.

What is needed, then, is to have the camera as accessible as possible, in a way such that you barely need to stop to take pictures. The solution, of course, is to keep all the camera gear on the outside, clipped to the harness. And so far, the best way I have found of doing so is to use a shoulder bag, such as the Lowepro Nova. I wear it on the right side and use a carabiner to clip its left side on one of the gear loops of my harness. This has a double advantage: it is a security in case I take a fall, and it keeps the bag out of my way. When not in use, the bag is zipped up and has the weather cover pulled up, thereby providing as much protection as possible. With a little bit of practice, I can even do all my bag manipulations with gloves and without stopping (on easy terrain, obviously). A shot of myself with the setup can be seen there.

The camera will be inside my backpack in only two cases: the first one is on alpine starts, as shooting by night is too much trouble for usually too little reward. I will generally get the camera out an hour before sunrise and try to get shots of climbers with headlamps on. Having moonlight helps a lot, too. The other case is when the climbing gets real hard. On steep ice or mixed terrain where I need great freedom of movement, the weight of the camera bag and the way it is distributed (badly) through the shoulder straps is just a pain, and I probably want to concentrate on the climbing anyway. There is often a small break after technical parts, to catch your breath and calm down, and I use that time to get all the photo gear out again.

Note: it has also been suggested by several readers that chest bags could be as efficient. I don't have direct experience with any of those, but it seems that the main problem with that solution is that the bag tends to hide the feet, which makes progressing on difficult terrain much harder and more dangerous.

How to not drop your stuff

Though I have only ever dropped my camera on concrete in big cities, falling gear is a constant concern while climbing (and the reason many climbers don't want to take a DSLR up there), for the obvious reason that the chances of recovery are remarkably close to nil. The key to not losing anything is then to not rely on your skills (between altitude, cold, tiredness, uncomfortable stances and big gloves, everyone can find a good reason to be clumsy) but to instead assume you will drop stuff, and figure out systems that will ensure they don't fall too far. Of course, being very careful helps as well.

In short, everything is, directly or not, connected to my harness. The first link, as already mentioned, is a biner from the camera bag to a gear loop (those are usually rated for between 5 and 20kgs, by the way, so assuming you're not bringing that 500mm f/4, you should be fine. If you want to be paranoid, use a cow's tail or a daisy). The next step is to connect the camera strap to the camera bag. The most convenient way I have found is to use a large biner and clip it to the bag strap, as this setup will slide up and down freely. The downside is that it needs to be reset every time the camera is going back to the bag, and there is a small chance you might drop everything in the window of time between opening the bag and clipping the biner. Another solution is to girth hitch a thin sling to the camera strap and then clip it to a biner on the bag strap, leaving the sling sticking out of the zipper when the camera is stored. You gain security but lose waterproofing.

For the small stuff (lens caps, memory card, batteries, etc...), I do everything inside the camera bag, not even above it. I have lost count of how many times a lens cap slipped from my fingers. Memory cards, and especially SD, are even worse. Bags like the Nova are nice because as long as you maintain them by their strap, they will stay upright and not spill their content out, but just to be on the safe side, I always shut the bag (but don't zip it up) as soon as I have taken what I need out.